Questions about Common Core and Youngest Learners

Samuel J. Meisels, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, has raised some provocative questions about the Common Core State Standards. By working backward from college and career readiness, he argues, the K-12 standards in English and math give short shrift to early childhood and the developmental needs of the youngest learners, from birth to grade three. And they miss half of early childhood by starting at kindergarten.

Massachusetts is one of 45 states that have adopted the standards. A year ago the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted curriculum frameworks that include the Common Core and aligned standards for pre-kindergarten.

“Early childhood education — concerned with children from birth to the end of third grade — seems nearly an afterthought in the [Common Core] standards,” Meisels writes in the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. “Not only do they end (or…